2. Mason
TWO
Mason
“Hold this,” Becca Clarke passed me her tray of snacks then wriggled around, making herself comfortable.
I took the chance to dig out a couple of chips that weren’t covered in every topping imaginable and snaffled them before she noticed.
She might be my best friend, but she was rigorously territorial about snacks.
She straightened her Rebels jersey, smoothing the C on the front and then sending a kiss to the heavens, one of those good luck things that she swore helped toward a Rebels win.
She had Brady Rowe’s number on her back.
Her jersey was from his first year as captain and she treasured it almost as much as she loved her snacks.
I had Eli’s number on my back because I was the best little brother in the entire world, and his biggest fan, although I’d never tell him that.
I’d looked up to Eli since I knew what a big brother was, and despite the lean years when I was an annoying brat and he was too cool for me, we were very close.
Him playing for the Rebels would’ve sent our parents into a frenzy given they’d been true-blue New York fans, but they’d never gotten to see him play.
I was fifteen when our parents died and nineteen year old Eli had become my guardian, a pseudo parent who didn’t know how to back off. He fussed and corralled and took me all over the country with him until I was old enough to go to college and then get a job.
Not that I’d moved far from him given I lived in Eli’s pool house free of charge and had no college loans to pay off.
Being the little brother of a millionaire pro skater had its pluses.
I would pay him back every cent one day, but it wasn’t happening now.
In contrast to Becca’s fading jersey, I wore the newest design I could get my hands on because hey, I got perks, and Eli had a ton of them just sitting in his office.
The only shitty thing was that it also had some minuses.
Like the fact I was hopelessly in love with my brother’s best friend—Boston’s world-class pushy irritatingly perfect D-Man, Xander freaking Holden.
Eli and Xander had been more like brothers than friends, close since they were old enough to hold a stick. Luck had made them teammates, but love and respect kept them in each other’s lives.
Lives that included me in a ton of different ways. I used to follow them everywhere, the boy who played hockey but didn’t really love it, the annoying and whiny one. My brother loved me the most, our connection was family, but for a long time, he’d rather have spent time with Xander than me.
I never told him that I’d also rather spend time with Xander because what had begun as hero worship had taken a turn to adoration of a very different kind.
Knowing I was gay was one thing, coming to terms with how Eli and I fit together in the brotherly dynamic after my announcement another, but when love for Xander hit me, it hit hard, and every part of teenage Mason fell for him in the worst way.
It was a futile love, the kind that was featured in older gay romances where there was never a happy ending. He would never be my boyfriend. He hugged me as a friend, teased me, ganged up on me with Eli, but he was straight, and had girlfriends, and was never going to be mine.
Only, everything had changed. Three weeks ago, without any warning, Xander revealed he wasn’t straight at all.
In a goddamn public to the world news conference, he’d told the world he was bisexual.
That he liked men. I was blindsided, hurt, but when I saw my brother’s expression as he listened to the news, I could see Eli hadn’t known a thing about it.
It wasn’t just me then that had his whole world turned upside down.
The day I told Eli that I was gay he simply shrugged, said it was cool, but I always recall what he said when we hugged. It’s not as if you want to play hockey as a career, so you can just be yourself.
Becca settled in next to me and took back the nachos, eyeing me suspiciously as if she was checking for crumbs.
I feigned innocence and after a moment, she was lured away from staring by the call of synthetic cheese and chilies.
Then it must have occurred to her that the teams would be out for warm-ups soon and I was still in my seat.
“Adhhdnsmpph?” she asked around a mouth of crunch.
“Not doing it tonight,” I answered because after years of sitting next to her at the arena, I could speak fluent nacho-ese. She hurried to finish the mouthful and nearly choked at the speed.
“What?” She wiped her mouth with the paper towel.
“No. You have to go down there and do the thing,” she said, and there was very real fear in her voice.
As if me going down to the glass was really Eli and Xander’s good luck thing before a home game.
“It’s the finals!” she added with as much shock in her voice as if I’d told her I’d killed a puppy.
“Maybe I’m actually bad luck?” I suggested, and her eyes widened. “What if I don’t want to do the thing?” I settled back into my chair, and she stared at me.
“But you have to. Without you doing the thing the Rebels will lose game one.”
“That’s blatantly untrue.” I gave her my best whatever look, and she thumped me on the arm. She pouted then pulled her lip between her teeth and gave me her puppy dog expression, the one I normally did everything to avoid. When I didn’t say anything, she even added a small please.
“Becca—”
“There’s plexiglass between you and Xander,” she explained as if I hadn’t thought about that.
“The last thing I want to do is… ” I waved a hand to the glass that was four rows below us, gesturing to the empty ice.
This was the first game I’d attended since Xander’s presser, always finding just the right excuse to avoid being at the games, to the point that Becca had to drag me out of the house tonight, insisting I had to go since it was the first in the Stanley Cup Finals.
This final push was best of seven against a strong LA team, but the first game of a series was always important and Boston had home advantage.
“You told me you’re over him,” Becca said right next to my ear, and I winced at the memory.
I had said exactly that, and for a few seconds, I’d actually meant it.
Xander featured heavily in my late night fantasies and in every one of them he had abruptly realized he was into me, and we would fuck like rabbits, fall in love, have kids, and a dog.
In those dreams, he loved me back as much as I loved him.
They were imaginative nothings just to get myself off, or at least that is what I told myself.
“I was lying,” I muttered, and she elbowed me.
“Well, I know that.” The implied duh was in the roll of her eyes. “But unless you tell him of your big unrequited love then how will he know?”
I shook my head because he’d had all this time to tell me he was into men as well as women, let me down gently, or explain to me how we could have an affair behind closed doors. There was a ton of things he could have done.
I checked around myself and lowered my voice again. “Maybe I only think I’m in love because I was safe in the knowledge that he would never return the feelings?”
“Jeez, Mase!” She was pissed with me, but that was probably more to do my refusal to do the warm-up ritual which in her eyes gave the Rebels supposed luck. “Go down there, smile at him, and put yourself out there.”
How in God’s name was I going to face Xander?
All this time I’d been flirting with him in my own way, and I thought it was going right over his head, but if he was attracted to men and he’d seen the flirting and thought…
oh holy hell… I could feel my face heating.
Xander was the reason I couldn’t get a sentence out in the correct order whenever I was near him in fear that he would realize I was crushing on him and laugh, and now he’s telling the world that all this time he was playing for my team.
Fuck my life.
I was angry at him, and supportive of him, and angry again, then embarrassed, and then I wanted to hug him, then punch him, then hug him again.
Twenty-one days since the presser and I’d run nearly the entire gamut of every emotion with my love for all things Xander Holden.
The only thing I hadn’t felt was hope that he would see me as anything other than his best friend’s little brother because he’d been bi all this time, and if he hadn’t yet swept me off my Nikes, then it wasn’t going to happen now just because he was out.
There was only one other person in this entire world who knew how I felt, and that was Becca.
She had this crazy sixth sense for things I was hiding, and five years back she’d caught me staring at his picture in the program at a game.
We’d been handed passes to meet the guys after a game, perks of being in the family, had good seats to watch all the action, and there I was staring at his picture.
She said I looked like a cat staring at cream… she wasn’t wrong.
A few beers later at a raucous bar, watching Xander and Eli leave with women on their arms, I’d lost my head and admitted to my best friend exactly how I felt.
It was cathartic, but it also led to a whole new thread in our friendship, one where she had a new determination to get me to tell Xander how I felt.
Like that was going to happen.